Security State

As heard on NPR's Fresh Air, We Have Been Harmonized, by award-winning correspondent Kai Strittmatter, offers a groundbreaking look, based on decades of research, at how China created the most terrifying surveillance state in history.

The life story of the most controversial, volatile, misunderstood provision of the Bill of Rights. At a time of increasing gun violence in America, Waldman's book provoked a wide range of discussion. This book looks at history to provide some surprising, illuminating answers. The Amendment was written to calm public fear that the new national government would crush the state militias made up of all (white) adult men - who were required to own a gun to serve. Waldman recounts the raucous public debate that has surrounded the amendment from its inception to the present.

As the daughter of a billionaire business mogul, Stella Brookshire has always lived an easy life, until a suspicious accident ends her blossoming career as a professional cyclist. Determined to get back on the bike, Stella ignores her parents’ pleas to find a safer hobby to pursue. Her father, though, wants to ensure her safety, and hires a bodyguard to go out with Stella on her bike rides. The bodyguard doesn’t last long, though, and neither does the one after him. No one seems to be a match for Stella’s sharp tongue or her vicious wit. But that’s all about to change when Cole ...

Lena Curtis’s life is going pretty well. She’s thirty-four, has a successful career, her own house, and enjoys her time alone. She’s an independent woman who knows she doesn’t need a man to complete her life. In fact, finding a boyfriend is the last thing she’s really looking to do. All that changes when she meets Shep Parkington, an amateur MMA fighter who is trying to make it pro, all the while escaping the clutches of his ruthless and dangerous family. He isn’t really looking for a relationship either, but neither he nor Lena can deny that there is certainly some serious ...

To the outside world, Drew Parker appears to have it all—he’s the owner of a successful security company, he’s wealthy, and he’s devastatingly good-looking. He has an endless supply of first dates, and he even plays in a popular underground band. But what people don’t realize is how haunted Drew is after his sister’s disappearance almost two decades ago. Gwen Lillie is the niece of a charismatic religious cult leader who fled to San Francisco once she turned eighteen. She experienced a loss similar to Drew’s when she was young and has spent her entire adulthood trying to ...

Bodyguards probably shouldn’t bake or have existential crises. Ezra Blumetti used to like being the exception to the rule. Now he’d like the rulebook back. That is, until his next job crash-lands onto his lap. Erin Miyaki. Brilliant, beautiful, on-top-of-the-world Erin. His old nemesis, always ready to call him on said BS. Not only is she in danger; she might be more of a mess than he is. Stuck together, he gets to call all the shots as her bodyguard. Which means payback. Erin should hate him all the more. Instead, they’re getting along. A little too well. As though Ezra’s existence...

In The Rise of the American Corporate Security State, Beatrice Edwards examines the real reasons to be afraid in twenty-first-century America, and outlines how we can address them. Our first steps in the right direction may be small, but they are important. They are based on the principle that we have a right to know what our government is doing and to speak openly about it.

Learn about the bomb blast that rocked the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church on Sunday morning, September 15, 1963, killing four young girls.

One of the most unique aspects of anarchism as a political philosophy is that it seeks to abolish the state. But what exactly is “the state”? The State is like a vast operating system for ordering and controlling relations among human society, the economy, and the natural world, analogous to a digital operating system. Anyone concerned with entrenched power, income inequality, lack of digital privacy, climate change, the response to COVID-19, or military-style policing will find eye-opening insights into how states operate and build more power for themselves—at our expense.

Based on hours of interviews with camp survivors and workers, thousands of government documents, and over a decade of research, Darren Byler, one of the leading experts on Uyghur society and Chinese surveillance systems, uncovers how a vast network of technology provided by private companies - facial surveillance, voice recognition, smartphone data - enabled the state and corporations to blacklist millions of Uyghurs because of their religious and cultural practice starting in 2017.

The American women’s movement has been shrouded in myths, argue three leading scholars in this bold and revisionist history. Eschewing the conventional wisdom that places the origins of the American women’s movement in the nostalgic glow of the late 1960s, Feminism Unfinished traces the beginnings of this seminal American social movement to the 1920s, in the process creating an expanded, historical narrative that dramatically rewrites a century of American women’s history.

Home is, in effect, the ideological autobiography of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka. The two dozen essays that constitute this book were written during a five-year span - a turbulent and critical period for African Americans and Whites. The Cuban Revolution, the Birmingham bombings, Robert Williams’s Monroe Defense movement, the Harlem riots, the assassination of Malcolm X...each changed the way Jones/Baraka looked at America. This progressive change is recorded with honesty, anger, and passion in his writings.

I would protect Ava Wells with my life. My best friend's kid sister is all grown up. I had one job: keep Ava safe from the stalker making threats against her life. The last thing I expected was the need to keep her safe from me.

Being Black in America is not an easy task. Black people in America are faced with the task of surviving in a system predicated on the notion that Black people were less than human, policed and enforced by a system that is rooted in slavery and racism. All while trying to succeed in a capitalist society where we are discriminated against.

For nearly 20 years, Aaron David Miller has played a central role in U.S. efforts to broker Arab-Israeli peace. His position as an advisor to presidents, secretaries of state, and national security advisors has given him a unique perspective on a problem that American leaders have wrestled with for more than half a century: Why has the world's greatest superpower failed to find a solution for peace in the Middle East?

A singular international publishing event, Conversations with Myself draws on Mandela’s personal archive of never-before-seen materials to offer unique access to the private world of an incomparable world leader.

Gretchen Sorin recovers a forgotten history of black motorists, and recounts their creation of a parallel, unseen world of travel guides, black only hotels, and informal communications networks that kept black drivers safe. At the heart of this story is Victor and Alma Green's famous Green Book, begun in 1936, which made possible that most basic American right, the family vacation, and encouraged a new method of resisting oppression.

On the night of September 11, 2012, scores of heavily-armed Islamic terrorists attack two United States government outposts in Benghazi, Libya. When the battle is over, four Americans are murdered, including the U.S. Ambassador; two are severely wounded. The terrorists destroy the two facilities, seize intelligence and other U.S. property, and chase America out of eastern Libya. This book tells the true story of why these Americans are there, how they fight for their lives, and how their government abandons them. It also explains how the Obama administration misleads and covers up what ...

In the early sixties, Calvin Trillin got his start as a journalist covering the Civil Rights Movement in the South. Over the next five decades of reporting, he often returned to scenes of racial tension. Now, for the first time, the best of Trillin’s pieces on race in America have been collected in one volume.

Milo “King” Kingsolver knows that Cassia Cafaro cannot keep a secret to save her life. Not that he minds; he’ll listen to her babble any day. But the beautiful, bubbly baker in a family of hard-asses has been off-limits from day one. But when Cassia asks him for one itty-bitty favor—to be her bodyguard for a long weekend—Milo discovers no good deed goes unpunished. Especially when that deed involves the Cafaro sisters breaking the One Cafaro Family Rule while big brother Roman is away. No, not breaking. Already completely broken. Smashed to pieces. For the first time, Milo wishes ...